Using an implicit task, researchers monitored how people automatically responded to words – in this case, whether they find it easier to link words referring to their partner to words with pleasant or unpleasant meanings - and this told them how likely couples were to split up.
Most research on relationship success has focused on how the people in the relationship feel about each other and this is usually done by the obvious route - asking them.
But people may not really know how happy they are, says Ronald D. Rogge, of the University of Rochester, and "to make things worse, a lot of people don't want to tell you if they're starting to feel less happy in their relationship."